Fingerprint Slides Experiment (4/6/23)

And now we come to the second part of the 4/6/23 experiment series! 

This was a little different, but just as fun as the depletion series (and, somehow, a little messier for me). That's not a joke; I'm the kind of person who ends up with my black powder all over my hair. The same is true for my magnetic. 

So, here, we have a series of smudges and depositions on glass and plastic slides that I then photographed using oblique lighting (no other lighting methods, unfortunately) and my phone's camera. Now, I know, I know, my phone's not the best camera in the world. It's permanently stuck at a 4.21mm focal length and it's not the best at adapting to lighting conditions. We weren't going to break out the Nikons for this, though. 

You can see that the oblique lighting we used, from our usual lab lights (these wonderfully adjustable lights-- you can move the arms and adjust the level of the light; and they sit in place so you don't have to worry about holding your flashlight in place) wasn't the best for my phone camera, and definitely not for the plastic slide all the way on the right, in the above image. It's kind of unfortunate. If I had more time to document these correctly, I definitely would have done so, because the ones on the plastic slides were very interesting; they were just hard to photograph. There are mitigation techniques I could have used that I wasn't as familiar with at the time (but I could put to good use now). 

I was working out of a yellow notebook for my personal (not lab) notes at the time, and realized that the cover would allow for some extra contrast when trying to photograph these slides. Now, it should be mentioned, not all of these are mine; some of them are ones I was comparing from classmates. That being said, it was a pretty fun experiment and I used to keep these on my wall, encased in tape (as you do with fingerprint powder).